The iTheater Project has announced the release of iTheater RC 1, a new media center for the Mac. iTheater allows you to manage, play and share your photos, movies, music and more.

According to the iTheater Project, "The goal of this project is to create an application that acts a media center for any Macintosh computer. iTheater is an aesthetically pleasing way to manage, play and share your photos, movies and music. Thanks to many dedicated developers and organizations, the iTheater Project is able to deliver FREE, open source software.

After almost a year of development, iTheater RC1 was released on January 31, 2006. Even though this release was not the final product of iTheater 1.0, the release marked a major milestone for the project. RC1 shipped as a universal binary and featured video, music, dvd, and weather modules."

We had the chance to install RC 1 (5.5MB) on a 1.42GHz Mac mini this morning. So far, the project appears to be off to a great start. We really liked the clean interface and simple menus. You can see screenshots of the interface here.

This is the saddest release of any program I have ever seen. Their forum is full of people asking them why certain features don't work, why it looks nothing like the screen shots and a few 10.3.9 users asking why they say it will work but doesn't.

Don't waste your time downloading it, unless you want to hear the explanations and excuses the "team" keeps rolling out.

I'd say that iTheater probably won't be at all usable for another year, at least._________________It's my fault Black Leaf died!

The UI is nice, but they need to make the text larger. I can't seem to get music working and there isn't anything for photos, but all my movies are running. Weather is useless because you can't change the location. There's a lot of room for improvement. I'll be keeping an eye out for future updates.

So far..It is crapware.. I've been using MediaCentral.. http://www.equinux.com/us/products/mediacentral/index.html
which is nice for freeware.. I like Media Central because I run my mini headless from my ibook..so the mini's shared itunes library shows up.._________________
New Orleans:Proud to Swim Home

http://www.equinux.com/us/products/mediacentral/index.html
which is nice for freeware.. I like Media Central because I run my mini headless from my ibook..so the mini's shared itunes library shows up..

Hey, that's pretty cool! I just downloaded. They just need to speed up the menus and snazz up the screen with album art when a track is playing. It works great, but looks kinda generic. This is unquestionably the best alternative to Front Row. Thanks for posting it!